


A Prince in Love

by khazadqueen (ama)



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: BoFA what BoFA?, Durin Family, Established Relationship, Everybody Lives, Family, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Secret Relationship, Thorin's A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 01:51:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1492318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/khazadqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thorin knows about Ori and Fíli from the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Prince in Love

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why I decided to write this; I've had the ending in my head for a while, but there was no fic attached to it until this afternoon. Basically, if you're looking for Fili & Thorin being bestest nephew & uncle ever, Fili and Ori being teenage dorks in love, and background Dwalin laughing at his husband at all times, you're in the right place.

Thorin sees it happening, but he doesn’t stop it.

(Sometimes, when their arguments sound too much like cave-ins and the weight of a warped crown already seems to rest on Fíli’s head, he will think of this and grudgingly admit that he has one thing to thank his uncle for—at least one.)

In general, dwarves let their young choose their own spouses with little interference. It’s a practicality, if anything, because once their hearts are carved and finished, they become as immovable as diamonds, and a dwarf in love has little care for anyone else’s thoughts. Dori doesn’t try and stop it either, and neither does Dís—but then again, they don’t know until later. Dís notices a certain lightheartedness in her son’s manner and is grateful that the darkness of her line doesn’t touch her golden boy; Dori sees his youngest brother acting more secretive than usual, chalks it up to adolescence, and reluctantly curtails his natural affinity for prying. Years later, they are both surprised.

The first person to notice is Dwalin. He and Thorin have just arrived home from a meeting in the Misty Mountains, and there is a feast. Thorin wants to sleep, of course, but food and warmth and company do ease the stresses of the road, and he is grateful to see his family again. Fíli is in his early seventies, so of course at some point he slips away from the main table, along with his brother, to socialize with the handful of other young dwarves his age. Thorin barely notices, until he catches Dwalin looking at the cluster of dwarrows with his eyes narrowed.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

But it’s stupid of Dwalin to think that Thorin doesn’t know every line of his face. So Thorin looks at him, and looks at Ori, son of Orla, and sees it. Squared shoulders, slightly lowered chin, averted eyes, the grin playing at the corner of his lips. He recognizes that look, and isn’t surprised or irritated the Dwalin spotted it before him. No matter their differences (and some will argue that, in the end, they have rather few of those), one thing Dwalin and Ori will have in common from now to the end: they fell in love with princes of Durin’s line. This is a kind of love that hurts, and is not easily hidden from those who know what it looks like.

Then Thorin looks at Fíli and sees himself. A tilted head, a lowered shoulder—the faint shadows at the forehead that will too soon become worry lines erased. It is the look of a prince in love.

(What he doesn’t know is that the boys in question have not yet noticed each other. It will be three weeks before they first hold hands, gripping too loosely for fear of revealing the hammering of their hearts, and another week before they share their first kiss while sitting on a mossy log in the sparse words at the base of the mountains.)

“That’s going to be difficult,” Thorin mutters into his mug, and Dwalin shrugs.

“Give it twenty years.”

It only takes twelve, as it turns out, but twelve years are difficult enough.

Thorin spends the first year internally bemoaning the idiocy of young fools in love, and the second and third alternating between relief and worry as the idiocy fades. It is replaced with the kind of steadiness and affection that a flirtation very rarely has—albeit one still hidden from most of the other dwarves. The fourth year, he occupies himself with inquiries, some subtle and some not, into the intimate details of Ori and his brothers’ lives. He spends a lot of the fifth year worrying about the Nori-related trouble he will have to deal with in the coming decades; Dwalin spends most of the fifth year laughing at him.

In the sixth year, Ori and Fíli have two or three small but serious fights, or maybe one large one stretched over several months. Thorin can’t be sure, because Fíli doesn’t talk about it with him. Regardless of what the argument is about, though, he sees the way it affects his nephew and he does his best to help. He makes Fíli twin swords, asks for his opinion more during council meetings, and (with Dís’s permission) allows him to escort a trading caravan to Bree without needing Dís, Dwalin, Thorin, or Balin’s supervision. It is pure chance that the caravan he chooses is Gloin’s, and so he is unable to _truly_ escape his relatives’ eye, but Fíli appreciates the gesture anyway. Fíli has technically been of age for almost decade already, but this is the year that Thorin really feels it.

In some ways, it’s the hardest year.

Kíli finds out about Ori and Fíli sometime in the next one. Thorin doesn’t know how, but he spends a lot of time pretending to believe Kíli’s ridiculous excuses for where Fíli is spending his time. They aren’t necessary—Fíli has, of course, had practice in being subtle, and his own excuses are rather better than his brother’s—but Kíli’s heart is in the right place. Thorin can’t resist passing on his more fantastical stories to Dwalin, who roars with laughter and then, with a grin, reminds him of the ways they themselves used to evade detection. In all honesty, they weren’t much better.

Just as the eighth year begins, Dís and Dori and most of the town finds out. It is Durin’s Day, and most of the colony celebrates from sundown to midnight, which is when the royal family traditionally opens its halls to the public. Ori, like everyone else, has had quite a lot to drink by that point, and in his delight at seeing Fíli he unthinkingly wraps his arms around his waist and kisses him. Fíli, unfortunately, is tipsy enough to kiss him back, though not drunk enough to pass it off as anything other than what it is: a greeting between lovers. When they break apart, they smile stupidly at each other for a moment before turning to look at Dís and Thorin with horrified expressions.

“Well,” Dís says. She sounds irritated, but she can see that her son is embarrassed and she does her best to be patient. “How long has this been going on, then?”

“Not long,” Fíli lies. He glances at Thorin and sees the lack of surprise on his face. “You knew?”

He raises his eyebrows in response and Fíli turns red. Dís forgives her son fairly quickly, but Thorin finds himself the target of his sister’s biting sarcasm for most of that year.

The ninth and tenth pass by without much interest--at least compared to the eleventh, which is marked by a quest and by dragonfire. Thorin loses interest in his company’s love lives; he is more concerned about their lives, fullstop. (The care of his own life he leaves to Dwalin, which is cruel of him. But Dwalin has learned to forgive some of his cruelties.) But at the end of it, after the battles and the bloodshed, they are alive and they have the mountain. Thorin sends a letter to his sister, has countless meetings with his cousin, and starts the long, slow process of turning Erebor into a home again. He thinks of home often, then. Of Dwalin, Dís, Fíli, Kíli, Balin. Of Ori, who he has known for several decades but never _understood_ until he saw him raising a borrowed hammer in Fíli’s defense against the Pale Orc.

He would have died. That is a fact—brave as he is, Ori is not a warrior, and if the entire extended line of Durin had not been hyperaware of the danger surrounding its princes, he would have died.

But then, Thorin would have, too. So he doesn’t begrudge him that.

The first dwarves from the Blue Mountains have begun to trickle into Erebor, and the repairs are progressing with the help of Dain’s people, when Thorin finds Fíli working on a secret project. He walks into the royal forges one evening to find Fíli and Kíli both there, consulting each other. These are not the enormous forges that most dwarves use—although these too are grand, with three furnaces and more tools than Men would have names for decking the walls—but private ones, for use by the line of Durin and trusted individuals. Thorin remembers creeping in here as a child and sitting quietly by the door so he could see his father and grandfather work; Thrain hammering out the shapes of blades and armor or finely-wrought cups, and Thror engraving the fine handles and setting them with gems. Now he stands and watches, as the closest thing in the world he will ever have to sons bend over the anvil and murmur about craftwork.

“What are you doing?” he asks and they both jump. Fíli slaps his hand over something too quickly for Thorin to see more than a metallic gleam, but there are a few other objects he can see. He steps over and picks up two silver beads, each set with a small amethyst. There’s a set of four.

“I thought silver would go best with Ori’s hair,” Fíli says, trying to sound nonchalant, as though a gift this rich was an everyday occurrence.

“I think you were right. What was there to argue about?” he asks Kíli, because he knew the sound of their quiet squabbling like he knew the sound of his own heartbeat. Kíli raised his eyebrows innocently.

“Arguing? Nobody was arguing. We were having a minor artistic disagreement... about that.”

And he points right at Fíli’s hand, betraying his brother in a spectacular fashion. Fíli looks murderous, but when Thorin holds out a hand, he doesn’t try to deny it. With a heavy sigh, he deposits a ring into Thorin’s palm. It takes him a moment to identify the metal—not gold or copper, but a mix of the two that takes on a warm, rosy-tinted color. Wedding rings are usually made of pure gold, but in exile that has become more a fashion than a rule. Thorin’s is silver, because they hadn’t been able to afford gold until nearly a decade after his wedding. Now they most certainly can, but he looks at the ring and thinks that somehow the soft, unassuming hue suits Ori better. There is no stone on the band, no seal, only a woven design that has been hammered flat. It is very well done; it shows off the skill of its maker without indulging in the Elvish frivolity that a braided ring would have.

“You were arguing over this?”

“Yes,” Kíli says quickly, before Fíli can speak. “Fíli thinks it needs more...” He waves his hand in the air. “ _Something_. I think it’s perfect.”

Thorin meets Fíli’s eyes and smiles. He can see the tension in his nephew; it bleeds out somewhat when he catches Thorin’s gaze, but it lingers.

“Your brother’s right,” Thorin tells him, but when Fíli holds out his hand he pauses and doesn’t surrender the ring. Fíli’s eyes tighten. He has been waiting for Thorin to say something about Ori. He’s been waiting for four years, because he doesn’t know how long Thorin has watched, how closely he has guarded both of his nephews in body and in heart. He still has no idea how deeply, fiercely, proudly Thorin loves them. “When a prince makes his Choice,” Thorin says in a quiet voice, “there are three questions he must answer. Usually his mother or his father asks them. If they are dead, or otherwise gone, he must ask them of himself... or he may choose a surrogate parent, who can also ask them.”

Slowly, Fíli nods.

“What are they?” His voice sounds rough, and he swallows. He sounds too young to be making this choice--but too young to have fought in a war, too, and all things considered this is easier.

“Will he make you a better dwarf?” Thorin asks. He knows the answer, because he has seen the way Fíli strives to be more patient, kinder, when he knows that Ori is admiring him, until it has become so ingrained in his heart that he no longer has to think to reach out to people.

“Yes.”

“Will he make you a better king?” he asks, thinking of the way Fíli becomes passionate about politics when he explains council meetings to Ori, gesturing grandly the entire time, about the way he listens when Ori eagerly tells him about history and the way they sometimes debate so fiercely that they do not speak for an entire evening, and must sometimes be forced to sheepishly apologize by their guardians the next morning.

“Yes.”

“Will he make you happy?”

A smile spreads across Fíli’s face before the last syllable has even left his mouth, and he almost seems to shine.

“Yes,” he says, and Thorin holds out the ring but is caught off-guard as Fíli steps forward and hugs him tightly instead. “Thank you, Thorin,” he mumbles into his shoulder, and then there is a second thump as Kíli joins the hug on his other side.

Thorin sighs. They haven’t actually been small enough to both fit in his arms in at least three decades, but he lets his hand rest on their backs anyway and holds them tight.

“Can Tauriel come to the wedding?” Kíli asks, his voice muffled, and Thorin can already hear Dwalin laughing at him.

He knew about Fíli and Ori from the beginning. He should have been keeping a better eye on the other one.


End file.
